Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line is a small act of rebellion against the era’s obsession with manners, systems, and “proper” conduct. As a critic who watched society try to choreograph everything from taste to virtue, he treats friendship as one of the few human relations that can’t be improved by instruction. The phrasing is bluntly puritanical in the best sense: “no rules,” “left to itself.” He’s stripping away the comforting fantasy that intimacy can be engineered by good behavior, social climbing, or moral self-help.

The subtext is sharper than it looks. “We cannot force it” isn’t just advice to the lonely; it’s an indictment of the social world that confuses networking with friendship. Hazlitt knew salons, patrons, literary circles - spaces where friendship could be a performance or a transaction. By pairing friendship with love, he collapses the usual hierarchy that treats friendship as optional and love as fated. Both, he implies, are unruly attachments that resist governance. Any attempt to domesticate them turns them into something else: obligation, convenience, alliance.

Context matters: Hazlitt writes in the wake of the French Revolution’s shattered promises and Britain’s tightening respectability. Public life was increasingly rule-bound; private feeling became the last refuge of authenticity. The quote works because it refuses a checklist ethic. It’s not romanticism as softness; it’s romanticism as anti-bureaucracy. Friendship, for Hazlitt, is a kind of consent-based miracle: it happens or it doesn’t, and the dignity lies in not pretending you can manufacture it.